Never again should Her Majesty have to blow a fuse at the Palace

The Queen was abroad at a state dinner listening to the speeches when she received an urgent message. Prince Charles was due to give a speech in St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle and the damned fuse had gone. Would Her Majesty, if it please her, kindly remind the footman where the right fuse box was to flick it back on?

Not long later, Windsor Castle caught fire after a hot spotlight lit up a curtain and afterwards it had to be substantially renovated. No doubt the Queen was sure to request that the builders, while they were at it, move the fuse boxes so that it was easier for everyone to remember where they were.

I’ll admit that the bill sounds very high. It amounts to a near doubling of the current annual sovereign grant for a whole decade. But it’ll pay for the renovation of a building with 760 windows, 100 miles of cabling and 20 miles of heating pipes. In budget terms, it’s equivalent to about 0.005 per cent of annual government spending. That seems a reasonable price tag for ensuring that Buckingham Palace isn’t left without heating or flooded by a backed-up loo during a state visit.

It’s bad enough that we’ve allowed the Palace of Westminster to get into such a dire state that urine is actually draining into MPs’ offices. Fixing up that estate will probably require Parliament to move out for years and cost £7 billion, which makes Buckingham Palace sound like a bargain.

Britain is meant to be a country that prides itself on efficiency. We’re British; we can run things; we make sure things work. Except that our roads are gridlocked, our trains packed and our Queen is doing an emergency stint in charge of the nation’s fuse boxes.

At least there’s one saving grace from our decades of penny pinching, which is that we haven’t managed to ruin all of our old buildings yet. The consequences of having too much money to spend can be nearly as bad as not having enough. Just look at the totally humdrum stainless steel kitchen Samantha Cameron installed in Downing Street, more suitable for a butcher’s shop than an official residence in a pre-Georgian terrace.

Samantha Cameron, the wife of Prime Minister David Cameron, has breakfast in her Downing Street apartment with Philip Kiley (left), eight, from Chorley in Lancashire, and Stevie Tyrie, eight, from Manchester, as part of her support for the charity Contact A Family which helps families with disabled childrenCredit:
Steffan Rousseau/PA

The sad fact is that owning and maintaining old stuff costs money. It’s absurd that the country’s most precious palaces should ever have been allowed to deteriorate to their current state. The Government and the Crown ought to draw up prudent plans for how they’ll maintain their estates in the future by putting money aside for massive renovations, rather than racking up enormous, unfunded bills.

None of that, however, means we can duck the responsibility now. We’re paying the price for decades of making do. These depressing, hyper-rationalist republican campaigners somehow imagine that if we kicked our longest-serving and best-loved Queen out of the palace and turned it all into a massive museum, we’d somehow be better off. I suppose a longer season for visitors might bring in a bit more cash, but whoever manages the place still has to grapple with a decades-long backlog of lead pipes and clapped out boilers. All we’d have done is make Britain that little bit meaner, smaller and duller. To avoid that fate, a new set of fuse boxes is a price well worth paying.